Oprah Winfrey’s position as America’s most sought-after author interviewer may be under threat after a surprise new contender showed their hand in the New York Review of Books: Barack Obama.

The American president interviewed the Pulitzer-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson in a lengthy piece which has just been published by the literary magazine, taking the author of Gilead through topics from Christianity to democracy. He told Robinson, who he has known since 2012 when he presented her with the National Humanities Medal, that “one of the things that I don’t get a chance to do as often as I’d like is just to have a conversation with somebody who I enjoy and I’m interested in … and so we had this idea that why don’t I just have a conversation with somebody I really like and see how it turns out. And you were first in the queue.”

Informing Robinson that her creation John Ames, a pastor from Iowa, is “one of my favourite characters in fiction”, Obama asked her “how your interest in Christianity converges with your concerns about democracy”. He also inquired how, given the importance of faith to Robinson, “at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them”?

“I believe that people are images of God,” Robinson told Obama. “There’s no alternative that is theologically respectable to treating people in terms of that understanding. What can I say? It seems to me as if democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level.”

Christianity, she said, is “supposed to be difficult”, and “when people are turning in on themselves – and God knows, arming themselves and so on – against the imagined other, they’re not taking their Christianity seriously”.

Homespun values … Obama and Robinson

Obama went on to quiz the novelist on her family and upbringing, and on the “certain set of homespun values of hard work and honesty and humility” held by her parents. “That’s part of what I see in your writing. And part of my connection to your books, I think, is an appreciation for – without romanticising Middle America or small-town America – that sense of homespun virtues,” said the president. “And that comes out in your writing. And it sometimes seems really foreign to popular culture today, which is all about celebrity and being loud and bragging.”

Robinson responded that “I really think that you have to go very far up in American culture to get beyond the point where people have good values”, Obama agreeing that “the issue to me, Marilynne, is not so much that those virtues that you prize and that you care about and that are vital to our democracy aren’t there. They are there in Little League games, and emergency rooms, and in school buildings. And people are treating each other the way you would want our democracy to cultivate. But there’s this huge gap between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about our common life and our political life.”

Obama also asked Robinson about race – “I know at least in Gilead that factors into one major character, trying to figure out how he can love somebody in the 50s that doesn’t look like him” – and about the genesis of Gilead and Home. The almost 4,000-word interview, the audio of which can be heard online, is the first of two pieces, with the conclusion of Obama’s interview of the novelist to be published in the next issue of the magazine.